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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Great Tween Reads

The teen area of the library can be overwhelming for newcomers. In my library, the Children's Department serves birth through 5th grade (or so) and book for kids in grades 6-12 (or so) are shelved upstairs in the Teen Scene. This can be an intimidating jump for new sixth graders (and their parents) to make! And I've found that our adult services staff is not always familiar enough with teen lit to recommend books that are appropriate for tweens and younger teens.

So, to help them out (because we're all in this together!), I came up with a list of Great Tween Reads, and, since I received several requests to share the list, here is it:

These are books that are shelved in our Teen Scene area that I would recommend for tweens (roughly grades 5-7). I solicited help from my lovely Twitter friends, checked out the books recommended on GreenBean TeenQueen's Tween Tuesday feature, and perused the Rebecca Caudill nominee lists to get ideas. (Other state book award lists are good resources for this age group, too. I just happen to think that the Caudill committees consistently combine popularity and literary merit to come up with excellent lists.)

It's long to (hopefully) ensure that there's something for everyone on it. My hope is to make the teen area less intimidating by showing parents that there *are* books appropriate for middle-grade readers in our teen area. And we are happy to help parents find them.

This list is *not* all-inclusive. It does not include tween books that are shelved in my library's Children's department, for instance. Also, it does not include many excellent tween books that my library doesn't own (yet). I copied the brief summaries from our library catalog and included them in the list. I also included a genre in bold at the end of each entry to facilitate readers' advisory.

Please take this list and use it in whatever way is helpful to you. Feel free to edit, share, etc.

And, please, if you have suggestions for additions, I'd be happy to have them! I'm particularly looking for titles that have more of a teen/YA "feel" but with content that's appropriate for younger readers.

What I've Been Reading

Our leadership team at the library is reading this book for a team book discussion early in the new year. Cy Wakeman has a lot of insightful and relevant things to say about leaders helping their employees deal with realities (instead of...

The other day I was browsing Netflix, wondering what to watch and thought I just might watch Cosmos over again. Listening to this audiobook was a good substitute. Tyson does what he sets out to do here: boils down his massive, technical ...

This thriller set in Southern Indiana and written by actress Krysten Ritter definitely kept me at the edge of my seat. Something's wrong in Abby Williams's hometown of Barrens, Indiana. Her ecological legal team has been brought in to in...

Grace Hopper made amazing contributions to the field of computer science that helped develop computers as we use them today. This would make a super family read, making the subject accessible to young children, if parents are interested ...